The Next American Music

Illustrations by Olaf Hajek

It’s early morning as I drive east from Charlottesville, Va., rolling fast through the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains toward Richmond, past the cigarette factories and horse farms, shopping centers and snug residential grids. Soon I’ll swing onto the southern third of Interstate 95 and chug south for nearly 200 miles, eventually docking in Chapel Hill, N.C. In a few hours, I’ll shu­e into Carrboro’s Cat’s Cradle, sip warm beer from a plastic cup, see friends and watch songwriter David Pajo—performing as Papa M—strum smirky folk songs.

While I-95 was constructed at the height of America’s romance with the road—around the same time Jack Kerouac propelled his bearded brethren out of cities and onto highways—the interstate’s contemporary incarnation is simply not that kind of road: gargantuan and numbing, impossibly dull, framed by fast food huts and gleaming gas stations, peppered by slabs of tire rubber, cigarette butts and crushed Coke cans. This morning I’m tired and bored; I count exits and yawn.

Over the last half-century, innumerable American highways have been similarly streamlined and demystified, rendered modern and efficient. Highway culture has changed, too, becoming lifeless, standardized, freeze-dried. Unsurprisingly, America’s landscapes are shifting in accordance, making way for brash human sprawl, conceding to “innovation,” yielding to our grimiest sins: Now, colossal mountain ranges are cut by strip malls, and white clouds are parted by thick gray exhaust. In response, America’s music is also changing, evolving, communing, and Americana—our sacred center—is in the midst of a self-reflexive revolution.

Collective notions of “Americana” tend to be both knee-jerk and bizarre: As an umbrella term, “Americana” is convoluted and sloppy, so overloaded with vague connotations and heavy-handed nostalgia that it’s been rendered almost meaningless outside the faux-log walls of Cracker Barrel gift shops. Is Americana a John Deere alarm clock? A wooden yo-yo? A peppermint stick? An old tin of Virginia peanuts?

As a genre signifier, Americana’s biggest problem is etymological. As tempting as it is to assume a connection, “Americana music” does not always mean American music, particularly in 2005. As Ray Raposa, frontman for San Diego’s Castanets, asks, “Are R. Kelly or Eminem or Hilary Duff any less American than Dock Boggs or Whiskeytown or Old Crow Medicine Show?”

Musically, Americana has much to do with bearded white people pawing acoustic instruments, employing minimal production (with a hint of twang), and dropping at least a few lyrical nods to the big Southern rivers. Loosely, it’s traditional folk music, a symbiotic swirl of bluegrass, gospel, blues and classic guitar-and-vocals emoting.

Sometimes Americana and American do mean the same thing. In 2001, the T Bone Burnett-curated O Brother, Where Are Thou? soundtrack, which featured a mix of plucky artifacts and modern Americana revivals, all homegrown, earned itself a mess of Grammys (including Album of the Year), sold over six million copies, and was almost instantly crowned America’s Unofficial Rough Guide to Americana.

The album’s unexpected success was curious, proving almost as quirky and anachronistic as the music itself. But lurking in the background of all the media hoo-ha was the vague sense that the record’s galactic reception was perfectly logical. In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that a soundtrack packed with old American folk songs would soar to the top of the pop charts during a year when nearly everything “American” was being challenged, threatened and rearranged. Chalk it up to snappy marketing, snowballing publicity or incessant NPR chat-ups, but something on that record (Its simplicity? Timelessness? Bold adherence to scrappy tradition?) sounded good to a significant number of people when nothing else in the cultural cookie jar (including the omnipotent Billboard stacks, which were piled high with prefab pop and snarly rap-rock) seemed capable of satiating the public’s cravings.

Almost all the contemporary artists included on O Brother—Alison Krauss and others—are well known (and generally acclaimed) keepers of the classic Americana flame, proudly maintaining the genre’s warm traditions and staunch rules of conduct. They are revivalists, permitting only marginal sonic updates, set on upholding Americana’s unspoken tenets of authenticity. Theirs is a noble pursuit, and yet it’s easy to be seduced by the organic glamour of old America, to spin kitsch into commodity, to rank banjos over synthesizers, general stores over Wal-Mart. It’s always been far simpler to wax nostalgic over the past than to work at re-imagining those sacred, spent traditions for an entirely new world—and to do so in an equally meaningful way.

Witness, then, a handful of pioneering musicians, settled comfortably at obscure or semi-obscure independent record labels, catering mostly to the twenty-something/T-shirt-and-Pumas set, but playing a new, weird kind of Americana, punctuated by twittering Moog synths and prickly classical guitar, harp strums and free-jazz sax wails. Like alt.country before it, nu-Americana (call it indie-folk, alt-alt.country, freak-folk, folktronica or something else entirely) is as concerned with the future as it is with the past, wholeheartedly and unapologetically embracing the strange synergy of the organic and the synthesized, the beautiful and the hideous, the real and the imagined. It is new highway and old mountain—together and at peace.

Obviously, subverting the acoustic doctrines of folk music is not an entirely new phenomenon. Craggy foundations of dissent were in place even before Bob Dylan blasted electric at Newport—avant-folk pioneers the Incredible String Band, British songstress Vashti Bunyan (who recently recorded a duet with indie-folker Devendra Banhart), bedroom saint Nick Drake, and the incomparable Captain Beefheart laid serious bricks in the 1960s, and contemporary acts like Sunburned Hand of the Man, Six Organs of Admittance, and the No-Neck Blues Band are currently twisting old folk habits into new (and sometimes unrecognizable) shapes. As Raposa explains, “It has to adapt if it is to remain true.”

In 2004, the Brooklyn-based Animal Collective released the mind-blowing Sung Tongs, a swirling collection of skewed psychedelia anchored by a pair of flailing, child-like voices and a sparkling acoustic guitar. Melodic and intense, Sung Tongs perpetually soars, as giddy and spastic as a three-year old’s birthday party. Lulling, folksy strums are constantly punctuated by hollers of “Meow!” or smatterings of tribal drums, successfully destroying notions of calm with sudden infusions of untempered glee.

Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox (who records as Panda Bear), embraces the idea of playing nontraditional folk songs that, while still intensely relevant to folk tradition, don’t always provide the expected strum-and-warble. “I feel like lots of people restrict folk music to acoustic guitars and yodeling and that sort of thing,” Lennox laments. “Hip-hop to me is very folkish. It may be a little exaggerated, but it’s still some secular shit. I try and keep my music and my words super-simple—I want to try and explain what’s going with me and mine in a direct and beautiful way. In that sense, I feel like I’m right in line with folk music.”

Along with Animal Collective, artists like Banhart, Iron & Wine, Joanna Newsom, Kimya Dawson, David Pajo, Will Oldham, CocoRosie, Castanets, Danielson Famile, Holopaw, Sufjan Stevens, and producer Brian Deck are pumping out music that feels instantly, gloriously intimate, familiar as it is strange. Collectively, they tend to avoid drippy folk clichés—banished are the closed-eye strum-solos, leftist pamphlets, crowd sing-alongs, helping hands. Despite almost oozing warmth, no one ever drifts too close to precious, consistently side-stepping rote sentimentality in favor of dark ruminations and sniggers. There’s sophistication, but no intellectual distancing, no ironic embraces, no evasive doodling. Instead: humor, sadness, poetry.

And unlike the O Brother set, there is little interest in simply reviving and renovating a pious past. “I have no desire to distort something old to make something new,” Lennox emphasizes. Instead, he understands Animal Collective as part of an uninterrupted sonic continuum. “Folk music, at least as I see it, has stayed healthy and strong. It’s just changed its mediums and arenas and that sort of thing—the spirit and the purpose isn’t any different.” Holopaw drummer Michael Johnson concurs: “The last thing I want to do is be a part of some Gram Parsons tribute.” You can’t go down home again?

As I stumble through an ammonia-scented Mobil Mart, ogling a massive rack of over-salted travel snacks, I feel oddly disoriented: plastic tubes of peanuts, orange crackers smeared with yellow cheese, pretzel rods, chocolate cupcakes crammed with buttercream, packets of pork rinds. Snatching a sack of barbecue potato chips and a bottle of iced tea, I head back to a freshly refueled car.

Sometimes I think that nothing better embodies the United States’ most basic ideology—liberty and justice for all—than its empowering, indiscriminately communal roads. America’s highways are inherently shared experiences, whether in memory or in present tense. We are a squirrelly country, twitching and skipping and forever relocating; these thin red and blue lines etched into maps and scrawled onto napkins unite us in perpetual motion.

When I asked Banhart what he thought about America’s highway system, he called our roads “scabs that the earth will soon flick off.” While he may have been kidding, as I whiz over long, anonymous stretches of interstate, it’s hard not to find some sense in his prophecy. The highway feels useless, temporary, itchy. So what is the new Americana, then? Recipes scribbled on grease-stained index cards? Prayer books cased in leather? Songs?

"Maybe Americana is wearing a certain type of shirt and playing an acoustic while someone moans over it,” Holopaw’s Johnson muses. “Or maybe it doesn’t have the finger-picking, but you still see a genuine American oddball putting his heart and soul into sound.”

In 2002, the Gainesville, Fla.-based band released its eponymous debut on Seattle’s Sub Pop Records. Holopaw is a graceful record, humble and delicate, and just over 30 minutes long. Lyrically, it teems with classic American imagery—KOA maps and clipper ships, short-wave radios and Appaloosa horses; musically, the record offers a seamless blend of plugged-in diddlings and warm acoustic strums, mandolin and pedal steel rubbing noses with broken synthesizers and dim percussive loops. Johnson (whose solo outing, the fantastically clever Nonsense Goes Mudslide, features mostly electronic instruments) embraces Holopaw’s hybrid mission. “A little fuzz bass here, a sixteen-track vocal loop there—that’s the fun part of it for me. How can we take this three-chord ballad and skew it a bit? Oh yeah, I’ll whistle out-of-tune in the third verse!”

Blending ’70s country-rock rowdiness with gentle, lo-fi flourishes, Holopaw nods to an impressively wide spectrum of influences. It’s the kind of music that can only be made right now, when access to both traditional habits and innovative techniques is essentially unlimited. “For Holopaw it’s becoming less of an obvious division,” Johnson explains. “The traditional elements have gravitated towards the weird, and the weird has moved slightly closer to the tradition. Because [the record] is rife with unconscious references, Holopaw is somewhat palatable in the current audio climate—but I don’t think it’s gonna make us huge or anything. We’re still a little too weird for that.”

Like Holopaw, many indie-folk players use electronics to twist their sound (like the swampy, organic-gone-electric rumblings of genre-forefathers Califone, or the high jingle of Chicago’s Fruit Bats), but not all of the genre’s harbingers have adopted warped synths or laptop blips as their primary weapons of subversion—Newsom relies on ethereal harp plucks; Banhart employs psych-blues warbles and prickly classical guitar; Castanets fold in hot, free-jazz improvisation; Stevens sports angel wings and sings songs about faith; and Daniel Smith of the Danielson Famile performs wearing a full-size, custom-made tree suit, appropriately accessorized with nine perfect pieces of fruit. Meanwhile, former cinematography professor Sam Beam, who records under the name Iron & Wine, engages in the kind of ancient, creaky, folk singing that’s far more chilling than charming.

When Beam tours, he plays rock clubs, not coffeehouses, threading his dulcet murmurs through giant, buzzing stacks of speakers, shot into sticky black boxes with NOFX stickers plastered to the floor, long frozen in place by infinitesimal coats of beer-and-spit shellac. Now watered down to Starbucks-ready, adult-contemporary mush, folk music was once progressive and audacious. When an onstage Beam commands reverent silence in a room more used to fist-pumping and hollering, his moves are just as brave, just as revolutionary.

A native of South Carolina (his voice still harbors a bit of drawl, even filtered through all that beard), Beam recorded his debut album, 2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, on a shoddy four-track in his Miami home (whispering into the microphone, legend goes, so as not to wake his sleeping daughter.) Composed solely of scratchy, barely-there vocals, acoustic guitar and a bit of banjo, The Creek Drank the Cradle is an intensely personal record, tackling faith, fidelity and human catharsis with sharp, poetic urgency. The magnetism of The Creek Drank the Cradle is undeniable; it’s the kind of record that gets passed around like dog-eared copies of Rilke or Robert Lowell, pressed into hands, slipped into six-packs, tucked under pillows. It’s impossible not to think that we would all be a little better off if it came standard in hotel drawers.

Despite the acclaim, Beam shies away from his reputation as a frontrunner of the new indie-folk movement. “I honestly don’t feel like I’m part of a scene,” Beam confesses. “But at the same time, it’s hard to deny it—the sound is similar, there are so many common people. I think people are always playing acoustic music, but public attention tends to crest. It cycles. Like the whole ’60s into the ’70s, when people suddenly wanted to hear something more synthetic. It goes back and forth. And now, pop music has just gotten so cookie-cutter.”

The Creek Drank the Cradle was followed by 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days, for which Beam ditched his home setup and headed to Chicago’s Engine Studios, home of nu-Americana brainchild Brian Deck. A founding member of Califone, Deck (who’s also produced Holopaw, the Fruit Bats and Modest Mouse) has long championed the marriage of odd percussive bits with traditional acoustic music, making sharp electronic flourishes sound as if they fell out of trees. “Brian became the kind of collaborating partner that I never even dreamed of,” Beam marvels. The resulting record was a bold step forward for Beam. Recorded with a full band, Our Endless Numbered Days features actual percussion and a handful of cuts that almost approach raucousness.

Despite widespread critical acclaim, sales of indie-folk records are relatively modest (collectively, Iron and Wine’s two full-lengths have sold about 123,000 copies). Still, Our Endless Numbered Days, along with Banhart’s Rejoicing in the Hands, Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender and Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs stand as some of the most-discussed independent releases of 2004. And while the indie-folk scene can hardly be called cohesive—unlike crunk or grunge or New York punk, it’s not geographically identified—there are still enough connections and cross-references to color code a map. Aside from fighting over the last dented Fender Rhodes at the local Salvation Army, indie-folk artists inadvertently share producers, labels, friends and tours. Even though Beam and Banhart have never met (“I’m supposed to meet him this week,” Beam laughs), Banhart still thanked Beam in the liner notes to his latest record, Nino Rojo; Beam and Holopaw, all Florida residents under contract with Sub Pop Records, have toured together; Stevens is signed to Sounds Familyre, Brother Danielson’s label, while Castanets are signed to Asthmatic Kitty, Stevens’ label. Banhart and Newsom have shared a tour; Newsom is signed to Chicago’s Drag City, home of Will Oldham. Old or new, folk is, after all, still an exercise in community.

Precisely how and why indie folk has reached such an apex in 2005 is difficult to figure out. Its sudden prominence could be chalked up to mass political uncertainty or a desire to resuscitate—and re-imagine—the intellectually charged dissent of the ’60s. Or maybe it’s a reaction to something we’ve lost in our landscapes, in our roads, in our food. Or maybe everyone is tired of music that’s too loud, too alienating, too perfect, and here are songs infused with the kind of basic, open-hearted emotion that made old Americana (and old America) so appealing. Songs that make it OK to stay inside, curled into your bed sheets, doors bolted shut, phone and television switched off. Or maybe it’s an even more personal response, a yearning for the kind of weird, immediate sounds that fit so neatly into America’s altered reality.

I arrive in Chapel Hill half-exhausted—heavy with the kind of sleepiness that usually comes from watching too much TV or spending too much time at the mall. I gather up my CDs, dig my toothbrush out of the seat cushion and yawn. I think about Papa M, about hearing chewed fingernails scraping steel strings, songs about body parts, a mewing violin. I think about feeling comfortable, anchored, home.